Founded in May 2016 by Varun Bhutani and Praveen Samariya,
SamayLa is a tool which helps to organise your mind. You can break a project down into actionable tasks. As an individual, it acts as your to-do list manager with an ability of creating a structured plan.
You can also invite your friends and teammates by going to the contacts section in your profile. This will enable you to work with others on each of these tasks.
There are
many features which make SamayLa different and which can add immense value to your life. The top ones are as follows:
1. Ability to break a task down into infinite levels.
2. Ability to assign a task to multiple people.
3. Ability to pin an assigned user to a task: Now this one is really interesting. If you pin a user, it ensures that the 'pinned' user is automatically assigned all sub-tasks. This saves you from copying someone again and again.
4. Personal Conversations: Through the visibility option, you can choose to send private messages to specific people.
5. Filters: There are filters at the root level which allow you to see tasks created by you, tasks assigned to you etc. Filters at task level allow you to view only attachments, only private messages etc.
GenesisWhile leading teams across 9 countries in Hong Kong, Varun realised that he was spending almost 4-5 hours everyday just answering emails and keeping track of what is going on. After coming back to India and backpacking across the country for over 1.5 years while starting two start-ups - a manufacturing consulting company and a not-for-profit education venture, he decided to look into analytics. At that time, over a weekend in Chennai, the idea sprang up. This was September 2012. Varun told his Chairman that he would be working on this over the weekends, apart from putting over half of his salary to fund the development. His Chairman, Venkat, was an awesome guy who allowed for this arrangement as long as it didn't clash with the business interests.
Varun continued in his efforts of sharing his knowledge and in one such session, he met Praveen who was also working on a similar initiative in the same college. They got talking and Varun shared the idea, progress till date which is when Praveen agreed to jump on-board as the CTO.
SamayLa has gone through various avatars to get where it is today!
Funding & MonetizationThe startup is bootstrapped so far. For monetization, the firm uses a Subscription based model with unlimited tasks, messaging, file attachments for 1 year & 2 years - called Lion & Shark respectively. Also, it offers 30 free tasks with an additional 5 tasks every time when you invite a user & they accept.
Till now, SamayLa has created around 3,000 tasks and on-boarded 5 organizations. The startup has around 240 registered users on its platform.
Future Plans Going forward, SamayLa will focus on international and developed markets with high penetration & quality internet access. Also, it plans to develop and implement intuitive features like templates which create a workflow in one click and allow for applications across multiple areas.
Apart from using the usual social media channels for their marketing purpose, SamayLa has also hired a digital media agency to strengthen its presence on the internet. In addition, it is looking at various magazines, blogs & tech journals to cover it. Also, the firm will be applying for various startup competitions to get coverage.
“In addition, SamayLa is speaking with a few investors who have experience of globally scaling products and we hope to leverage their experience,” said Varun Bhutani, Co-founder, SamayLa.
Market Size & Opportunity Commenting about the market size & opportunity, Varun added, “Worldwide spending on public cloud services will grow at 19.4% CAGR from nearly $70bn in 2015 to $141bn in 2018*. We intend to capture a big share of this market.”
